Month: April 2017

Executive director of Climate Nexus Jeff Nesbit suggests that humanity might be extinct by 2050. “The human race could vanish in the blink of an eye within our lifetimes … there is a dark, threatening side to the AI story, and it is only now being discussed publicly.” Nesbit Nesbit draws from the fears of individuals […]

LARRY CARLSON

When did we stop seeing their suffering…
When did we stop hearing their screams…
When did their suffering we inflict become NOT our responsibility…
When did we find any excuse for their imprisonment…
When did their entrapment become our given…
When did we stop believing in their natural right to live free…
When did we become so cruel…
When did someone else’s pain become so amusing…
When did we lose natural respect for life…
When did we turn the world into this living and breathing constant pain…

Sometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to clear the room of bullies and bad habits. Freak cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan’s brutal Mongolian empire, for example, while the Black Death of the 14th century capsized the medieval theocracy and gave the Renaissance a chance to shine.

Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate.

In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at http://www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to…

Ria Del Montana very contentious question. depends on who you ask. what are your thoughts?

Dimitri Douchin What makes a bow and arrow a reasonable technology (a tool?) while cars less reasonable. I have a few criterea in mind: – ability to rebuild from ubiquitous materials – tool efficiency proportional to the human input – minimum impact on the “environment”, or none at all. I’m pretty happy with that. I thought I’d ask the pro rebels

Ria Del Montana i like your 3rd point the best. i might go with that to frame it as something like “-maintains or enhances co-adaption or symbiosis within habitat community.” thanks for challenging me to clarify thoughts on this.

Dimitri DouchinRia Del Montana Do solar panels match that 3d point? In my understanding they don’t, and that bothers me, in the sense that I wish they did

Ria Del Montana my gut says no. that would have bothered me a while back, but i kinda gave up on the utopian notion of sustainable living without the primitive

Mike Mangion And by allowing people to use your precious knowledge you become the tool yourself which ticks the box of human input, as I do myself when teaching others pottery Dimitri and Ria.

Ria Del Montana wow, i feel like i’m on some kinda spiraling shroom trip. this is getting way deep! Anyone object to me posting this thread on my blog?

Justin Stout I like this.. “Technology is more than wires, silicon, plastic, and steel. It is a complex system involving division of labor, resource extraction, and exploitation for the benefit of those who implement its process. The interface with and result of technology is always an alienated, mediated, and distorted reality. Despite the claims of postmodern apologists and other technophiles, technology is not neutral. The values and goals of those who produce and control technology are always embedded within it. Technology is distinct from simple tools in many regards. A simple tool is a temporary usage of an element within our immediate surroundings used for a specific task. Tools do not involve complex systems which alienate the user from the act. Implicit in technology is this separation, creating an unhealthy and mediated experience which leads to various forms of authority. Domination increases every time a new “time-saving” technology is created, as it necessitates the construction of more technology to support, fuel, maintain and repair the original technology. This has led very rapidly to the establishment of a complex technological system that seems to have an existence independent from the humans who created it. Discarded by-products of the technological society are polluting both our physical and our psychological environments. Lives are stolen in service of the Machine and the toxic effluent of the technological system’s fuels—both are choking us. Technology is now replicating itself, with something resembling a sinister sentience. Technological society is a planetary infection, propelled forward by its own momentum, rapidly ordering a new kind of environment: one designed for mechanical efficiency and technological expansionism alone. The technological system methodically destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, constructing a world fit only for machines. The ideal for which the technological system strives is the mechanization of everything it encounters.”

Ati Quigua, an indigenous leader from Colombia, listens during the 15th session of the U.N…

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — To hear Ati Quigua tell it, New York City is a place where people who don’t know each other live stacked inside big buildings, gorging on the “foods of violence,” and where no one can any longer feel the Earth’s beating heart.

Quigua, an indigenous leader whose village in Colombia sits on an isolated mountain range rising 18,700 feet (5,700 meters) before plunging into the sea, is just one of over 1,000 delegates in town for the 15th Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues that ends Friday.

“On top of the temples of the goddess and Mother Earth, they are building castles, they are building cities and building churches, but our mother has the capacity to regenerate,”…

Human beings cannot be called a keystone species because our influence on nature is not disproportionately large compared to our abundance (population size). Our cities, roads, and technologies, however, have altered nearly every ecosystem on Earth.

I’ve been thinking about the human niche or role in wider ecosystems and aside from the wide savannah style plains on which we evolved it seems we are a keystone species in most other ecosystems, but not quite.

If a keystone or engineer species is one which, through its actions is able to create habitats, control water/moisture/nutrient cycles, maintain species composition etc like Grey Wolves, Sea Otters or Beavers, then humans are like a keystone species BUT – we act to create ecosytems which are for us, instead of for other species. We control megafauna, use fires to ensure grazing grounds, remove unwanted predators, hunt top through bottom of the food web, create spaces for species which benefit ourselves. In short we are more like a ‘mirror’ species – one which always acts to recreate the world in our own image.

Agriculture, horticulture, permaculture, control through fire and hunting, pseudo-herding of grazing animals etc. These are all strategies to make the ecosystem for us, not for others.

But otters, beavers, and all of those other species aren’t doing it for the sake of the other species. It’s all independent organization.

Lemon ants have a symbiotic (or perhaps agricultural) relationship with Duroia trees. It goes on to kill all the other trees and saplings growing in the area, forming large swaths of monocropped Duroia trees in tropical forests, known as Devil’s Gardens.

I’d the say difference to humans doing this and the behaviour found in other organisms is on two accounts: one, humans are overpopulated, and two, humans do it in such a way that it forms a positive feedback loop, like how super-predators work. The vast majourity of other examples in nature are organisms forming alternative stable states, and thus are retaining a form of homeostasis. When this isn’t directly the case, it’s because it’s a smaller part of a cycle. A good example would be how sea urchins will overtake kelp forests to form urchin barrens, which then become overrun by predators like starfish (or the sea urchins out compete themselves and die out since there’s no more algae for young urchins to eat) and turn back into kelp forests.

There’s is a certain level of redundancy build into the ecosystem. Certainly removing redundancy will improve efficiency, but at the cost of making the system increasingly more fragile, until you reach overshoot. When I think of carrying capacity, I think of it as having two distinct levels: optimum population, and maximum population. Maximum population is the most population a territory can support without some of the population dying. Optimum population is the level when intra-specific competition becomes a selection factor. Below optimum population, individuals can expand to use what they wish more or less freely without inflicting upon others of their own species. Think of it like a territory being divided into farming lots. Each family may be comfortable having a 200 acre lot, that’s more than they need to survive, and they probably would have a very hard time physically managing such a large lot just themselves. But that keeps a level of redundancy. If all the land fills up with territories, then if the population keeps growing lots have to get smaller lest some families die. They can still survive on anywhere down to 10 acres per family (twenty times the optimum population), so long as they modify their way of life and take extra care to be as efficient with what they have available to them as possible. Though then there’s no redundancies, and if a bad year comes people will be dying regardless.

Many other species are territorial too, and dispersal is a vital part of the life cycle for those species. But unlike humans, they don’t band together limitlessly to keep control, don’t seek ever increasing efficiency, and they regularly engage in warfare concerning territory ownership. Many of them don’t acquire their own territories and are subject to natural selection, something humans seem unwilling to accept among our species but is vital to maintaining homeostasis.

So although I agree with your classification of humans as inverse keystone species, I disagree that it’s based on agriculture or herding, there are thousands of other species that do this and many other ways of niche construction. Instead I posit that humans are so detrimental and unnatural because they are unwilling to accept a risk of death in their lives, both for themselves and for other humans.

That was a great reply, a good read, I’ll re-read it again and do some more research into some of the things you mentioned. I dont specifically blame agriculture for our inverse behaviour, but agriculture is a ‘super’ form of niche construction. Have you seen the work from Lisi Krall? She posits that agriculture is a specific form of ‘ultrasociality’ available to social animals and insects. She shows that the agricultural unit becomes its own unit of selection – which, if true, would be very powerful and explain the astonishing success of agriculture once it got started.

I understand that no keystone species does it for others (although indigenous traditions would disagree with that) but in terms of ecology of course beavers and sea otters are not just being altruistic. I suppose what I mean is that the form of niche construction that humans take is inherently destructive, we don’t seem to form an equilibrium to our own or others advantage. I like the thought that our own prevention of death is to blame. Have you seen the work by Masahiro Morioka? He wrote a book called ‘Painless civilisation’ which is all about civilisation as a structure designed to keep pain and death away. You can find portions of the translations from Japanese online.